We've all been there: you've downloaded an episode of your favourite TV show to watch on your commute or stream to your living room, but the file you downloaded isn't supported on the device you want to use it with. Once a significant obstacle to enjoying your media anywhere, this problem is easily solved by any number of free media converters. Keep reading for a closer look at the most powerful and easiest to use media converters.

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Windows (with iTunes, WinAmp, or KMPlayer): Free plug-in tool MiniTube hunts down music videos from Flash-based video sites and plays them along with your tunes. MiniTube's signature feature is the ability to play the video synced up to your local MP3—in other words, lip-synced to wherever you are in the song when the video starts playing. Its video accuracy depends, of course, on the accuracy of YouTube uploaders (and the video's copyright status), but you can tell MiniTube that a video is wrong and have it re-search, and it can be set to disappear when there's nothing to grab. Check out a video demonstration of MiniTube in action below.

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Windows only: Rename the thousands of MP3 files in your digital music library and add or edit tags, lyrics, and album art in one fell swoop with free utility TagScanner. Not only can TagScanner clean up the artist, album, song title, and track number information for your digital music files, it can rename your songs based on a pattern you define (like %artist% - %title%), it can make music playlists, and search online databases like freedb and Amazon to automatically tag music missing information. It includes a built-in player as well so you can listen to tracks while you edit. We've recommended Media Monkey to whip your music's metadata into shape, but TagScanner looks like a solid alternative. TagScanner is a free download for Windows only.

iTunes 8's new default music visualizer, based on the beautiful Magnetosphere plug-in, has several keyboard shortcuts that customise its look and behavior—not listed in the iTunes help file. Macworld lists them:

• + and -: Increase or decrease the intensity (brightness) of the particles; multiple presses further increase or decrease the intensity.
• A and S: Add or Subtract particles to the visualizer. You can make the visualizer as complex (or sparse) as you wish.
• R: Reset the intensity and particle count to their default values.
• E: When in nebula mode (press N), this greatly accentuates the nebula clouds, making them very easy to see. (If you've used the M key to change modes, you may find that the nebula clouds aren't visible; it seems they're only used in certain modes.)

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After Sanity launched its Australian Loadit music subscription service last month, there were muffled complaints about the price, but the biggest complaints of all came from users who didn't want the Loadit button appearing in their Windows Media Player by default. The Loadit store is automatically added when you check for updates, and by the time you realise it has appeared, it's a bit late to do anything about it. If you don't want to have Loadit in your face every time you play a song or video clip, do you have any choice? Lifehacker explores your options.

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Streaming music lovers already know that YouTube is a veritable treasure chest of music videos and other audio goodness, and new webapp MixTube makes listening to YouTube clips easy. Similar to Muxtape—but without the part where you upload songs—you create a MixTube playlist by adding URLs of YouTube clips to the app, like this Beatles playlist. You can also shuffle songs or put them on repeat once you've created your playlist. Not sure what happens to the MixTube audio if the video clip gets pulled, so make and email around your playlist while you can.

Subscription music services have been slow to start in Australia, but seem to be gaining traction. A month after Sanity released its much-delayed LOADIT service, Vodafone has entered the fray with MusicStation, a subscription music service for mobile phones which claims to offer more than a million tracks. After insllating the MusicStation app, selected tracks are downloaded to your phone for local playback; if the phone memory fills up, your least-played tracks are automatically deleted. The service is a fair bit cheaper than Sanity's rival service, costing $2.75 a week. There are no additional download charges, but you do already need to be a Vodafone customer, you can only access music in 3G areas, and you do need to be have one of the supported handsets (currently LG KU990 Viewty, Nokia 6121 classic, Nokia E65, Nokia N73, Nokia N95 8GB, Sony Ericsson C902, Sony Ericsson W880i, Sony Ericsson W890i, and the Nokia 6210 Navigator.) You'll doubtless have noticed the absence of the iPhone from that list -- despite Apple's players being the standard in the music market, it's apparently more or less impossible to get a commercial subscription scheme up and running on its devices. You could always try the Last.fm app, but that will chew through your download cap if you're not on a Wi-Fi network.

Favtape, the Seeqpod-powered counterpart to the still-shut-down Muxtape, has upgraded with a wealth of user-friendly features since we last looked at it. The simple layout remains the same, but now it's easier to arrange your playlist, share your "tapes" with a static URL, embed a playlist with album art, and connect and listen from an iPhone. Because Favtape relies on Seeqpod's web-based MP3 searching, there's still somewhat of a hit-or-miss factor with song playback, but that also makes it less likely to come down when the RIAA gets sufficiently annoyed. Favtape is a free service, requires a sign-up to save playlists.

Thanks to a new partnership with Rhapsody, Yahoo adds playable music clips to their search results. Give it a try: Search for an artist like Madonna, and play popular tunes (up to 25 full-length tracks a month) at the top of the results in-browser. The main Yahoo Australia site doesn't sport this feature yet, but you can access it at the global search sub-page. How does Yahoo do with your favourite artist? Yahoo [via cNet]

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iPhone/iPod touch only: Free streaming radio app FlyCast can grab streams from more than 1,000 digital radio stations, but what's unique about it is how it does so. FlyCast can be set to conserve battery life by pre-buffering minutes of music, and only occasionally using your Wi-Fi or cellular connection to grab more. More importantly for multi-taskers, by disabling the "Quick Play" option in FlyCast's settings, the app can be set to open audio streams inside your device's mobile Safari browser, which can be minimised to let you do other things while the audio plays on. For a free application, FlyCast sure solves a major annoyance of owning a web-connected music player. FlyCast is a free download, requires an iPhone or iPod touch running at least the 2.0 software.

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